But as you get closer you realise that’s not quite the whole story: you begin to see straight lines, edges and sharper outlines, and it all seems a bit scratchier – more like horse hair than angora.Continue reading “come closer”

March went out like a lamb and it’s been gloriously warm recently – so much so that I am afraid we have already had our summer – so I had begun to wonder what had happened to the April I know and love who provides us with such constantly changing weather that we are never short of a topic of conversation.Continue reading “the first cuckoo”

The word yellow has been wandering through my mind in search of something to connect with.

It could connect with bulldozer. It could connect with huge chunky slablike somethings that hang in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t. It could connect with the small, leech-like Babel fish.

It could connect with the eyes of a huge eagle with circles tattooed on its wings, or with Kate Schechter’s battered Citroën 2CV.

It could, of course, just connect to fields like the one in the photo, and the rapeseed flowers that are spreading across the English countryside at this time of year: a veritable Suffusion of Yellow.

As I am too busy to write more than a few words, I thought I’d just post a photograph and this seemed the “busiest” picture I’d taken in a while.

Then I stopped to wonder what the plant was and it occurred to me that if every one of those flowers turns into a fruit of some sort, it must be one of the shrubs that is covered in tiny berries through the autumn and winter. I don’t know many shrub names, but it seems likely it’s a variety of cotoneaster.

My pronunciation of that is something akin to KO-tun-ee-aster, but having written it down, I’ve remembered my mother’s humorous referrals to the cotton-Easter plant. Which makes it almost topical.